Bacterial attachment to surfaces in virtually any non-sterile aquatic environment is a well-established phenomenon. Industrial efforts to prevent colonization or to clean fouled surfaces amount to costly expenditures in a number of industrial sectors. Often, such expenditures are made for cleaning programs that include the use of surfactants. Surfactants are regularly employed in water treatment programs as agents believed to play a role in the removal of organic masses from surfaces, in the enhancement of biocide efficacy or in the assistance in the water miscibility of various biocidal agents. Surfactants are also regularly used in the agrichemical business, particularly to enhance the action of herbicides. This is accomplished by using the surfactants to alter the surface behavior of the applied droplets, maximizing their interaction with the leaf surface.
There are numerous examples of surfactants which are able to inhibit the colonization of surfaces by inhibiting the overall growth of the organisms in the target environment. Most surfactants, regardless of class, show some inhibition of surface colonization when used at concentrations high enough to impede bacterial growth. In the water treatment industry, the most well known surfactants which impart a measure of colonization resistance to submerged surfaces are the cationic quaternary amine surfactants, which also function as biocides. However, even the relatively mild nonionic surfactants can exhibit toxic effects upon microbes, e.g., bacteria or fungi; the concentration of nonionic surfactants necessary to mediate toxicity is typically substantially higher than for cationic surfactants, however.
Examples of nontoxic control of surface colonization typically require the use of high concentrations of surfactants not feasible in water treatment industries where thousands or millions of gallons of water would be treated.
The present invention relates to the use of surfactants which act by inhibiting microbial adhesion to surfaces in contact with an aqueous system. The materials of the present invention have been previously used in areas such as fiber wetting in the textile industry. These materials function to inhibit adhesion at concentrations below which toxicity has been observed for the tested organisms.